It can be fairly challenging to put on HoloLens properly for the first time. And a headset that is not properly adjusted can result in blurry or not full field of view.

This was often an issue when I was showing off our HoloLens creations. Sometimes the headset is just not put on correctly, and the user will lose half of the field of view, and often the whole point of the demonstration is lost. Of course, as the demonstrator – the person not wearing the HoloLens – I didn’t see what the user saw or didn’t saw, so we ended up with an awkward conversation.

“Can you see the little blue dot in the middle?” or “Is the edge of the holograms’ display area sharp or blurry?” or “are you sure you’re not seeing about *this* much of the Hologram?”

To help with this issue, the HoloLens calibration tool has a first step that asks you to adjust the device on your head until you see all edges. But that doesn’t help us when we have to demonstrate our own app, does it?

So, after doing hundreds of in-person HoloLens demos, I decided it’d be nice to copy this functionality for our own apps. And thus, the HeadsetAdjustment scene has been born. It is currently a PR to the HoloToolkit, but hopefully it’ll be merged soon, making it my second HT contribution.

The Experience

The User will se a similar invitation to adjust the headset so that all edges are visible. He can then proceed to the actual experience by air tapping or saying “I’m ready”. Simple!

The Developer’s Side

First, a huge thanks to @thebanjomatic for his tips on finetuning the scene!

The headset adjustment feature is implemented as a separate scene, and can be found as HoloToolkit/Utilities/Scenes/HeadsetAdjustment.unity. The simplest usage scenario is when you don’t want to modify anything, just use it as is. For this, all you have to do is add the HeadsetAdjustment scene as your first scene, and your “real app” as the second. The HeadsetAdjustment scene will automatically proceed to the next scene when the user airtaps or says the “I’m ready” phrase.

Of course, you can customize the experience to your liking. To change the text that’s displayed, you can edit the UITextPrefab properties here:

By default, the next scene is selected automatically based on the scenes included in the “Scenes in Build” window of Unity. In the above example, the HeadsetAdjustment scene is #0 (meaning it is loaded and started first), and the actual app loaded after the adjustment is the GazeRulerTest – the #1 scene.

However, you may want to override this. The HeadsetAdjustment script allows you to specify the next scene by name in the NextSceneName property. If you enter anything here, it’ll override the default behavior of finding the next scene by number, and it’ll load the scene with the name provided in this field.

You can also customize the voice command the user can use to proceed in the Speech Input Source.

Happy demoing!

Now you have a way to ensure that the person you’re demoing your latest creation to has the best possible experience. Enjoy!

 

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